Enter Don Cheadle, a movie star with a musical background and enough respect for the genius behind Birth of the Cool that he knew a standard Let Us Now Praise Famous Men story simply wouldn’t cut it. Doing double duty as director and Davis avatar, the 51-year-old actor decided to take a page out of the subject’s playbook — by throwing away the playbook entirely. The result, Miles Ahead (named after the trumpeter’s 1957 album with Gil Evans, and in theaters on April 1st), eschews everything from his bebop roots to his Bitches Brew fusion explorations.

… “I said, ‘I think we’ve got to make a movie about this dude as a gangster’ — ’cause that’s how I feel about Miles Davis. He’s a G. All those apocryphal stories about how bold and dynamic he was, the gangster shit he’d do … you could fit all that into a biopic, I guess. But I just thought, let’s do a movie that Miles Davis would say, ‘I want to be the star of that movie. Not the one about me. The one where I’m the fucker running it, and I tell everybody what happens.'”

Read more at Rolling Stone.